“I have been informed that you are Mrs. Billy Graham,” an Associated Press reporter leaned over Ruth’s shoulder and said. “Will you confirm this?”
She didn’t deny a thing, and after the speech was further questioned by reporters. “It was no great matter,” she remarked, “it was simply that the sign was rather stupid.” She had acted instinctively in removing it. “The man had every right to his opinion,” she said. “But when the President of the United States is speaking it is definitely not the place to express his opinion. I am the mother of five children and disrespect has never been tolerated.”3
Major television networks covered Ruth’s sign-snatching, and former President Richard Nixon telephoned her.
“Good for you!” he said cheerfully.
The next morning the story was in newspapers throughout the United States. The protester, Dan Pollock, was a twenty-eight-year-old member of the antiwar Red Hornet Mayday Tribe, which had recently lost a civil suit charging that the group had been illegally excluded from Billy Graham Day in 1971 when Billy and Nixon had appeared together in Charlotte.4
Pollock realized who his assailant was and immediately signed a warrant for Ruth’s arrest. He charged her with assault and battery, telling the magistrate that she had shoved him.5
“A lawbreaker,” Ruth wrote. “Me. Taught from childhood to keep the law. Well, I was taught respect too. Respect for my elders, respect for those in authority. And manners. One didn’t interrupt when another was speaking. That is why I have chafed so when demonstrators and hecklers have increasingly disrupted public speeches particularly when the President of the United States is speaking. I get irritated when thousands turn out to hear the President and the cameras panned in on the handful of demonstrators. It is like being at a banquet and someone burps and the press zeros in on the burp.”
The Buncombe County sheriff telephoned Ruth at her Montreat home, embarrassed to tell her that it was his task to serve the warrant. He asked to meet her at the BGEA’s Montreat office. She knew this probably wasn’t a great idea and suggested they meet at the courthouse. The press was on her trail, cameras ready for the sheriff to hand her the warrant. She explained all this over the two-way radio in her car and arranged to meet deputies between two stores in an obscure area of Asheville.
“Now what do I do with it?” she asked her Charlotte lawyer moments after receiving her summons.
“Just mail it back to me,” he said. “And don’t talk to reporters.”
Sadly, the world was cheated out of the press statement she had already written. “The only difference is,” part of it read, “if it had been my son, instead of a reassuring pat on the shoulder I’d have given him a resounding whack on the bottom!”
If convicted, she would face a fifty-dollar fine or thirty days in jail.
“I’ve already made up my mind,” she told her lawyer. “If there’s a question of a fine or jail sentence, I’ll choose the jail sentence. I feel very strongly that what I did was right and paying a fine would be to me an admission of guilt.”
She had rolled up her sleeves and was calmly stubborn and ready to fight. “I could get a lot done in thirty days in jail, I think,” she mused in her journal. “I’d relish the encounter challenging a law that protects demonstrators of radicalism and immorality instead of patriotic citizens.”
The morning of the trial, Friday, August 29, she wrote Pollock a letter, telling him how much God loved him, explaining how he could come to know Christ. She tucked it inside the handsome brown leather edition of the Living Bible she planned to give him. Shortly before 1:00 P.M. she and her lawyer parked beside the Mecklenburg County courthouse. The courtroom was virtually empty when they entered, but it soon filled, reporters lining the walls. A group of admirers from nearby Shelby slipped her a note, telling her that they had come to pay her fine, should she be convicted.
Pollock was sworn in and questioned. When the defense asked him if Ruth Graham had shoved him or in any way touched his person, other than patting his shoulder, he admitted that she had not. Forty-five minutes later, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. She caught up with Pollock as he headed toward the courtroom door. “I’ve been praying for you,” she said warmly. “Will you accept something from me?”
“That depends on what it is,” he replied suspiciously.
She slipped the Bible from her pocketbook and held it out to him, almost shyly. He drew back in disgust.
“No, I’d rather not,” he said as he hurried away.
Reporters and photographers surrounded her.
“How would you like it if someone snatched a sign away from you?” one reporter asked, shoving a microphone in her face.
“I wouldn’t be carrying a sign,” she replied.
“Would you do it again?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Why did you object to Pollock’s carrying the sign?”
“Because thousands of people were being deprived of their civil rights.”
“Did you offer Dan Pollock a Bible?”
“No comment,” she answered.
She was drawn back into the safety of the courtroom and the judge angrily swooped to the door. “Now get out!” he barked to all.
That night Nixon called to congratulate Ruth. “It gives me a renewed faith in the American judicial system,” he ironically said.
President Ford telephoned her two nights later.
“Don’t you want to hire me full time as a sign-snatcher?” she asked him.
“I’ll place you in the front row,” he replied.
In the spring of 1975, Billy released a statement to the press that read, in part, “Americans have a responsibility to provide humanitarian aid to Indochina and call for urgent negotiations to assure the safety of South Vietnamese whose lives are endangered…. With compassionate hearts for the very needy individual and family we Americans have a responsibility to make available medical assistance and food required to heal and sustain life for all Indochina’s homeless, needy, and afflicted people.”
Shortly afterward, Elizabeth Wilson, a friend of Ruth’s, told her that sixteen members of a Vietnamese family were in danger and needed someone willing to sponsor them if they were to be safely evacuated from Vietnam. Nghia, a member of the family, had graduated from Montreat-Anderson College the previous year. Miss Wilson had helped him financially, as much as her meager resources would allow, making it possible for him to finish college. After leaving Montreat, he wrote her an anxious letter, confiding that he feared his relatives would be executed. He wanted Miss Wilson to sponsor sixteen of them. It was something her small pocketbook could not manage.
“Hold on a minute,” Ruth told her after hearing the story.
She put down the phone and walked into her husband’s office, stopping at the edge of his desk. “Did you mean what you said?”
“What do you mean?” Billy puzzled.
She reminded him of his press statement and told him Nghia’s story.
“BGEA will sponsor the family,” he replied, simply.
Days later a man telephoned Billy, saying he had a list of one hundred and fifty refugees that the Christian and Missionary Alliance was willing to sponsor. He needed to get the list to the White House, but with his every attempt, it seemed, he was connected to the wrong secretary. Billy called President Ford, and within several weeks the Christian and Missionary Alliance group and Nghia’s family were transported by aircraft carrier to Guam and the Philippines.
“We have, each one of us,” Ruth wrote at the time, “felt like we were a small part of a miracle, and though we have been sitting on pins and needles, it has been thrilling to watch God at work.”
Through it all, she seemed unperturbed. Without flinching, it seemed, she bore the loss of parents, the separation from children, the arrest, the escalating pressures of not only her husband’s ministry but her own. There was always someone who needed her, and now she was grappling with the deadline for her first book of poetry.6 She was travel
ing more than ever; and the interruptions and responsibilities were always there.
She made it seem easy because in fact she hid it all so well. Ruth was placid on the surface, like the Chinese she had grown up with, impossible to read and, in her own way, proud. The first visible manifestation of stress had occurred some twenty years before when she had developed a chronic cough. It was an affliction that doctors had never successfully diagnosed, much less cured, for they could find no physical cause. She suffered severe headaches. By the late seventies, she began experiencing numbness in her legs and feet, and sometimes in her hands. Again, the cause seemed to be stress.
In January 1976, she experienced what she thought was a heart attack when a breathtaking tightness gripped her chest and her fingers began to tingle. A friend rushed her to an Asheville hospital, and she was kept in the coronary unit for several days. Billy returned home to be at her side. Though the media reported she had suffered a heart attack, the doctors found no cause for her symptoms. Still in pain, she was released and flew with Billy to Mexico for a rest. A week later, the symptoms were gone.
Obviously, vacations were a matter of necessity, and it was ritual for the Grahams to take at least one lengthy rest each year. Usually they left the country, traveling to places where he was less likely to be bothered. Most often they stayed in Mexico in a condominium owned by a Dallas businessman, or they traveled to Europe. Sometimes they stayed in Jamaica with singers June Carter and Johnny Cash, whom they had met in the late sixties when Billy asked Cash to write a Christian song for young people.
June and Ruth met shortly afterward and became deep friends. “It was as though I’d always known her, it was as though she had always known me,” June reminisced on a rainy morning in her office just outside Nashville. “She was girlish and lithe in a loose pink sweater, black slacks, and knee-high boots. Honest, we’re buddies,” she said. It was typical of her and her husband to intervene when the Grahams were exhausted and whisk them off to a secluded spot. The Cashes furnished a special wing for them in their Jamaican home, including a handmade seven-foot-long mahogany bed and antiques.
On February 1, 1976, the Grahams’ vacation in Mexico was interrupted when they were jolted awake at 5:20 A.M. by an earthquake. It was mild, inflicting no more damage than cracked plaster and windows. Three days later, some five hundred miles south, Guatemala suffered what at that time was the worst earthquake in the history of Central America. More than twenty thousand people were killed and seventy-five thousand injured. Thousands of the homeless were sleeping on the ground. Thousands more had moved into lean-tos made of cardboard, plastic, and fragments from leveled buildings. Eight inches of silt blanketed cities.
Adobe houses were flattened, and bodies were bulldozed into mass graves as the threat of epidemic loomed. Billy was informed that supplies had been donated for relief, but no money for transport. He replied that the BGEA would guarantee the necessary funds. Next, he began telephoning influential friends who donated planeloads of high-protein bread and medical supplies. Billy agreed to meet with Guatemalan church leaders to discuss the rebuilding of the country.
On February 13, the Grahams boarded a friend’s Lockheed Jetstar and followed the coastline, passing over volcanoes and rugged mountains, into Central America. Guatemalan President Kjell Laugerud Garcia was at the airport when they arrived and asked to see them immediately. They were driven across the airfield to a small building where they found him, dressed in fatigues and surrounded by armed soldiers, journalists, and government leaders. He greeted the couple warmly and placed two military helicopters at their disposal. His twenty-seven-year-old son Luis would fly them to fifteen of the three hundred cities that had been most devastated.
The helicopter landed in a pasture in San Martin, where several small boys leaned against a barbed wire fence, their grimy faces furrowed with tears. Beyond lay ruins where four thousand people had died. Those left needed food, salt, and medical supplies. People wandered about aimlessly, numb with shock. Ruth stopped several of them and through her interpreter heard stories of entire families wiped out. Old graves had been split open, and new ones had been dug. The stench of death rose from rubble.
Numerous small tremors occurred while the Grahams were there, one coming in the midst of a talk Billy was delivering in a church in Guatemala City. Oblivious to trembling lights and walls, he was startled when members of the congregation jumped to their feet. Assuming they were reacting to something he said, he toned down his message. Assuming that he knew what he was doing, the congregation didn’t move for the remainder of the service. Afterward, he looked up to find the ceiling literally dangling over their heads.
The visit to Guatemala ended just as abruptly as it had begun, and the Grahams again boarded the small jet, their hearts heavy. They felt inadequate and older than their years. Ruth was depressed, wanting to help and unable. She was sickened by suffering she could not heal. The aid the BGEA had financed and instigated seemed insignificant among so many homeless people. Midway into the flight, their pilot began talking to another pilot flying several hundred yards below them. He mentioned that Billy Graham was on his plane, returning from Guatemala.
“Tell him,” crackled the reply over the radio, “that I was converted at one of his crusades.”
1. Ruth Bell Graham, Sitting by My Laughing Fire (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977), 225.
2. January 25, 1969, Private Papers of Virginia Leftwich Bell, Montreat, North Carolina.
3. Fran Schumer, “Mrs. Billy Graham Grabs, Keeps Protester’s Sign,” Charlotte Observer, May 21, 1975.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Sitting by My Laughing Fire (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977).
19
CHAPTER
Lighting the Darker Places
THE CHILDREN’S HEALTH CENTER MISSION
ON THE PLATFORM, 1995
There is little love in prison and Ruth had been an angel of mercy, lighting the darker places where no light, hope, or love had been.
—Marvin King
The front door was heavy wood, dark and lustrous, with a stained-glass window at the top. Along the tree-shaded street, the townhouse was no different from many others in Detroit’s Palmer Woods residential section near Sherwood Forest. It was a breezy early evening, Friday, June 27, 1976. Two police officers paused on the porch, summoned there by a hysterical man who had dialed 911 twenty minutes earlier to report that he had just killed someone. The officers drew their revolvers as they entered.
They found Marvin King kneeling on the living room carpet, his head bent, eyes glassy and empty. He was a handsome man, in his early twenties, six foot two with a lean, muscular build. He seemed in shock; all that he had ever worked for had been obliterated in a violent moment. He was an accomplished pianist who loved Beethoven and Bach. He was a college graduate, well versed in Dickens, Yeats, and Shakespeare, vulnerable and shy, and prone to stutter. His accomplishments were prodigious for a dirt-poor black born out of wedlock in rural North Carolina. But with each mile along the tracks, he had been unwittingly heading for a break in the rails, an instability in his foundation yawning ahead. On this day, he lost it all in an explosion of rage.
Marvin King did not look up when the uniformed legs flanked him as he slumped over the bloody blue carpet. At his knees lay his best friend, Jim, killed by the repeated and frenzied blows of a kitchen knife.
“I am the murderer,” he stammered, reeling with nausea.
They slipped guns back into holsters and cuffed his hands behind his back. They led him out into the night.
King was born in a one-story clapboard house, south of Fort Bragg. His father had vanished before his son was born. Mrs. King was a sharecropper’s daughter and, too poor to feed her son, she put him up for adoption when he was five. His grandmother interceded and raised him in Red Springs, twelve miles from the place of his birth. After high school, he applied to Montreat-Anderson College and was enrolled in the fall of 1969. He began attending
Ruth’s Sunday school class and was struck with her personality, her essence.
“It is scintillating,” he would later say from prison, “almost contagious.” She liked him, sensing his gentleness and quick mind. She reflected his worth to him. “She was able to give me what my mother couldn’t,” he would say. His graduation was delayed a year when both uncles were killed in an automobile accident and he returned home to take care of his grandmother. He was vice president of the honor society and graduated in 1972 with a three point five grade point average.
In 1974, King moved to Detroit where he lived with a family he had met at a Baptist church there. A year later, holding jobs at both a hospital emergency room and General Motors, he moved into the townhouse. That was when trouble began. He became involved with Jim, the blue-eyed, dark-haired son of a General Motors lawyer. A heroin addict, Jim moved in with King and began his predation, manipulating King’s emotions and borrowing money he rarely repaid. The combination of the drug influence and the intensity of the relationship increased King’s instability and paranoia.
In the spring of 1976 King lent Jim two thousand dollars, ostensibly so his friend could travel to Holland. Jim was to meet a woman, his Dutch fiancée, he explained calmly. He wanted to marry her. It was a cruel lie, a scam to rob King of more money. When by chance he saw Jim on the street weeks later, King was wild with pain and anger. They argued in the apartment.
“I never cared about you,” Jim told him coldly. “I’ve just been using you all along.”
Convicted of second-degree murder, King was sentenced to seven and a half to fifteen years. “I was suicidal,” King recalled. “I was suicidal until she came to see me.”
In mid-October, Billy Graham was holding a crusade in Detroit. A friend flew Ruth in a private plane to the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson. She was led into a large glass-walled visiting room where she saw a man sitting in a far corner, his face hidden by a heavy beard. She recognized the eyes watching her fearfully as she approached.